At 5 A. M., I awoke with this strong dream:

A bitter controversy rages between my young parents and me about my right to dress my child. Dad speaks in a barely audible tone of voice. I refuse to listen. Later, Mother barges into the room, carrying a folded satin blue outfit and demands I put it on my child. Again, I refuse. She threatens to cut me out of my inheritance if I persist. I take the child and leave.

This strong dream thrilled me with its new developments in my individuation. True, Twelve-Step recovery has afforded me with voice, expressed uniquely in speech and writing. True, I’ve owned my sinfulness, weighted with guilt and shame, but little lightness has resulted. Also true, I’m loathed to express differing opinions, but remain mute when a response is indicated.

The bitter controversy in the dream attests to this change, especially arguing with the young parents, Mother and Dad as I remembered them; symbolically, they represent authority figures responsible for developing the personas of their offspring, or in Jungian terms, clothing them. That Mother intends to force my dressing my child in a blue outfit infuriates me, given the color blue associated with the masculine and my actual mother’s penchant toward this gender; she never actualized her own. And the fabric satin suggests entitlement, another face of pride, in which I grew up.

And leaving behind my inheritance speaks of my resolve to detach even further from the crusted residual in my psyche. There is another way, its dynamics similar to the Twelve Steps but with a light-some outcome: Martha Moloney’s Inner Child Meditations, available through Generation Mindful, a conglomerate of on-line therapists, devoted to Reparenting the Inner Child. It works, like nothing I’ve ever tried.